Month: August 2015

Over the past several month I’ve been prototyping various aspects of an IoT platform – or more specifically, exploring the concerns of “soft” real-time handling of communications with potentially hundreds of thousands of devices.

Up to this point, being in .NET ecosystem I’ve been building distributed solutions with a most excellent lightweight ESB – MassTransit, but for IoT we wanted to be a little closer to the wire. Starting with the clean slate and having discovered Apache Storm and Nathan’s presentation and I realized that it addresses exactly the challenges we have.

It appears to be the ultimate reactive microservices platform for lambda architecture: it is fairly simple, fault tolerant overall, yet embracing fire-n-forget and “let it fail” on the component level.

While Storm favours JDK for development, has extensive component support for Java developers and heavily optimizes for JRE components execution, it also supports “shell” components via its multilang protocol. Which is what, unlike Spark…

This post is the first part of a brief overview of Service Fabric and how we can model Service Fabric Actors in F#. Part 1 will cover the details of how to get up and running in SF, whilst Part 2 will look at the challenges and solutions to modelling stateful actors in a OO-based framework within F#.

What is Service Fabric?

Service Fabric is a new service on Azure (currently in preview at the time of writing) which is designed to support reliable, scalable (at “hyper scale”) and maintainable distributed applications and services – with automatic support for things like replication of state across nodes, automatic failover & recovery and multi tenanting services on the same instances. It supports (currently) both stateful and stateless micro-services and actor model architectures (more on this shortly). The good thing about Service Fabric (SF) from a risk/reward point of view is that it’s…